Revolutionary o u t c o m e s in Iran and Nicaragua: Coalition fragmentation, war, and the limits of social transformation J O H N F O R A N a and JEFF G O O D W I N b a University of California, Santa Barbara; bNew York University

A theory of revolutionary outcomes in the Third World The concept of social revolution conjures up images of dramatic, fundamental, and enduring political, economic, and cultural change. Yet the comparative study of the actual outcomes of social revolutions work that would lend detail and pattern to such images - remains in its infancy. Certainly, most Marxist writing about revolutions, as Michael Walzer has noted, "has focused on the great question: how to get started? What are the causes of revolution? There has been less interest, surprisingly, in outcomes "'~ And although Jack Goldstone has identified three generations of scholars who have studies the causes of revolutions, Ekkart Zimmermann has recently pointed out that "there is not even a single generation of scholars, not to speak of three" that has studied the outcomes of revolution in a comparative f a s h i o n . 2 In this article, we present a theory of revolutionary outcomes in the Third World and apply it to the cases of Iran and Nicaragua. More specifically, we suggest a theoretical approach for tracing out the results of a certain type of social revolution, of which Iran and Nicaragua are principal examples. This logic builds upon our earlier work on the causes of revolutions in the contemporary Third World 3 and attempts to synthesize scattered arguments about the outcomes of revolutions that are found in the work of Theda Skocpol, Susan Eckstein, and Jack Goldstone, among others. In our earlier work, we noted that most successful revolutions in poorer, dependent countries have been characterized by the formation of broad, multi-class coalitions either in opposition to highly repressive and narrowly based (usually personalist) dictatorships that have been historically supported (and perhaps installed) by foreign powers or, Theory andSociety 22: 209-247, 1993. © 1993 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

210 alternatively, in opposition to direct and highly authoritarian forms of colonial rule. Furthermore, the success of these broad coalitions in actually toppling such regimes has been made possible by, among others factors, a permissive international context or "world-systemic opening" that is characterized above all by the suspension of external support for the dictatorship or the withdrawal of the colonial power. With the fall of the old regime, however, the original revolutionary coalition typically begins to fragment, as the common enemy that once held the coalition together has disappeared. Such fragmentation has led to a sometimes bloody scramble for power among former allies following the overthrow of the old regime. 4 The specific outcomes of this type of revolution are largely explained by which set of organized political leaders within the original revolutionary coalition is able to consolidate its hold on state power after the overthrow of the old regime and by what that leadership is willing and able to do with that power. Our focus on struggles to control and maintain state power as the key for understanding revolutionary outcomes is taken from the work of Theda Skocpol. 5 The revolutionary reconsolidation of state power, in this view, requires the reformation of state institutions that have typically been shattered with the fall of the old regime, especially the army and civil administration; it may also require the implementation (or at least recognition after the fact) of more or less extensive political and social changes in order to win or maintain the support (or at least neutrality) of various sectors of the population that have been mobilized during the revolution. Certain revolutionary initiatives, however, may be more or less compromised, if not undermined altogether, by the exigencies of the struggle to consolidate state power in the face of opposition from other social groups as well as by certain legacies of the old regime, including the state's limited administrative capacities and material resources, and its dependence upon the capital and skills of domestic elites. This accounts for the often-noted fact that the outcomes of revolutions are hardly ever those intended by the new revolutionary leadership, let alone those intended by other groups in the original revolutionary coalition. As Susan Eckstein has argued, furthermore, the historic economic underdevelopment and dependence on the world economy that characterize much of the Third World may severely constrain attempts to transform socioeconomic structures radically unless the new leader-

211 ship is able to link up with a powerful foreign sponsor - which, of course, only recasts the problem of dependency in a different guise. 6 The overthrow of the old order also invites external intervention, including economic sanctions and military assault, since foreign powers especially, in the post-World War 1I context, the United States - generally attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities of the new regime for their own economic and geopolitical purposes. 7 In short, struggles over the control and disposition of state power following the overthrow of old regimes in Third World societies - the outcomes of which largely determine the specific results of such revolutions - typically occur in a context characterized by the fragmentation of the original revolutionary coalition, limited state capacities, economic underdevelopment, external aggression, and continued dependence on the world economy or domestic elites. An adequate account of the outcomes of Third World revolutions, consequently, needs to tease out the specific effects of each of these factors on struggles to reconsolidate state power. Although the control and deployment of state power thus stand at the center of our analysis, we wish to qualify this approach to revolutionary outcomes in two specific ways. First, the "objective" requirements of rebuilding effective state institutions do not strictly determine such outcomes; indeed, these requirements are themselves subject to interpretation and struggle and thereby leave plenty of "play" for the ideology and popular commitments (if not the personal whims) of the new revolutionary leaders. In other words, the exact nature and extent of the transformation of state and society - or the acceptance of changes wrought independently of the new leadership by one or another social group - is partly determined by the social base and political ideology of the new revolutionary leadership. We believe, then, with William Sewell, Lynn Hunt, and Jack Goldstone, among others, that the ideological visions of the new revolutionary leadership also partly determine revolutionary outcomes, although, as mentioned above, such visions may be compromised in the struggle for power - and "the" revolutionary leaders, in any event, may hold antagonistic ideological visions of the new society.8 Furthermore, class, religious, and other social conflicts, which are themselves entwined with specific cultural idioms, may also independently shape the outcomes of struggles for state power as well as the policies of the new leadership.

212 Second, a focus on struggles over the reconsolidation of state institutions must not overlook the fact that revolutionaries have other goals and commitments besides controlling and maintaining state power. Here we would distinguish our approach from Farideh Farhi's important work on Iran and Nicaragua, whose synthetic approach to revolutionary outcomes is otherwise very similar to o u r o w n . 9 Like Skocpol, however, Farhi often depicts revolutionary leaders as concerned exclusively with state-building objectives. Farhi recognizes that the ideological sacrifices that revolutionaries will make in order to maintain state power are not unlimited; 1° yet she stops short of suggesting that the ideology, popular commitments, and simple self-interest of revolutionaries might lead them, under certain circumstances, actually to cede state power without an all-out fight. In the wake of the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, however, which we analyze below, we are now in a better position to see that revolutionaries will not do anything and everything in order to maintain state power. 11The Nicaraguan case also challenges Skocpol's argument that the exigencies of revolutionary state-building prevent the emergence of liberal-democratic post-revolutionary regimes. We have chosen to examine the specific cases of Iran and Nicaragua in this article not only because they are remarkably contemporaneous examples of a more general type of revolution in Third World societies (and because they are revolutions we happen to know something about), but also because, despite important similarities, these are revolutions that have had dramatically different outcomes. Most importantly, the Iranian revolution has produced an authoritarian theocracy, whereas the Nicaraguan revolution has given rise to a pluralist democracy. An adequate theory of revolutionary outcomes, however, ought to be able to account for both the similarities and the variations in such outcomes; the Iranian and Nicaraguan cases, being in many ways quite distinct, are therefore especially appropriate for developing and testing such a theory. Thus we are attempting to advance the understanding of revolutionary outcomes in two ways: by a theoretical synthesis of several more one-sided perspectives and by inductive comparative analysis of two cases, which allows us to trace the differential impact of the major factors in the theory in diverse contexts. We should emphasize that the "outcomes" of the revolutions we discuss are not all fixed, final, or irreversible. However, revolutions do have short- and medium-term consequences that are important both in their own right and in terms of the constraints and pressures they create for

213 future events. The Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions are little more than a dozen years old, and while some of their outcomes are more or less strongly institutionalized, others are of a more tenuous or uncertain nature. What follows, then, is a sort of "interim report" on the consequences of these revolutions - not an attempt to bring artificial closure to on-going historical processes. In our conclusion, we delineate some of the principal similarities and differences between the results of these two revolutions to date. One of our principal conclusions is that to a large extent these revolutions may be viewed as defeated social revolutions - that is, genuinely mass-mobilizing revolutions that, despite significant political and cultural achievements, have nevertheless failed to transform economic and class structures radically. In Iran, as we show here, this was largely a result of the character of the political leadership that consolidated power after the fall of the shah. In Nicaragua, the absence of radical social transformation was more a result of the revolutionaries' limited political capacities as well as the power of their opponents, both internal and external.

The outcomes of revolution: Iran

The complex struggles over power in post-revolutionary Iran cannot be understood unless the underlying causes of the revolution itself are briefly addressed. The origins of the events of 1977-79 may be found in such factors as the uneven impact of 25 years of oil-fueled industrialization and dependent development under Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi's repressive monarchy; the elaboration of both secular and Islamic cultures of resistance, ranging from liberal nationalism to militant Islam to Marxist and Islamic socialism; and a conjunctural revolutionary crisis when falling oil prices triggered a recession, while U.S. President Jimmy Carter's human-rights-oriented foreign policy led to an easing of the shah's repression) 2 The result of these diverse processes was the coalescence of a broad coalition of classes and groups in the course of 1978, including clerics (the ulama) and middle-class intellectuals in leadership positions, as well as a massive base of striking industrial workers, hard-pressed merchants and artisans of the bazaar economy, students, office workers, professionals, and urban lower-class women and men from the shantytowns of the major cities. (Iran's impoverished but widely scattered peasantry remained largely inactive outside of a few local pockets of rebellion. 13) This urban and multiclass "populist" movement unified in opposition to a repressive, personalist dictatorship and the untoward influence of its major foreign

214 backer, the United States. The movement's swift and relatively nonviolent success in toppling the shah, however, would set the stage for an intense, ongoing conflict after the victory of February 1979. Debates on the outcome and nature of Iran's revolution since 1979 have been intensely disputatious. For a number of the protagonists, as well as for both academic admirers and detractors, the proper term for the revolution is "Islamic" 14 This interpretation, of course, stresses the ideological outlook of the clerics who eventually emerged as the victors of the revolution. Others debate whether Iran has in fact experienced a full-fledged social revolution, with some seeing it (in the beginning at least) as "populist" and "anti-imperialist" 15while others have labelled it "petty bourgeois," "bourgeois," or even "fascist." 16 These labels hint at the political and social forces that made or later came to control the revolution, as well as the discourse and social basis of the powerful Islamic Republican Party (IRP). The present analysis focuses on the dynamics of the broad coalition that made the revolution in an attempt to answer the question of how one group - the ulama - came to prevail after 1979. It also attempts to explain why the ulama's hold on the Iranian state and society has ultimately proven stronger than that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. An explanation will be sought in the forces that brought about the fragmentation of the revolutionary alliance between 1979 and 1981, the ways in which external, world-systemic factors (including war) shaped the course of events, and the nature and degree of social-structural transformation that occurred in Iran during the 1980s. These issues in turn repose on the social structure of Iran, the nature of the new state, the perdurable consequences of economic dependence, and postrevolutionary struggles over the political-cultural heritage of 1978. In the process, the transition from a populist revolution to an Islamic Republic will be documented.

Internal political struggles

The process of the Iranian revolution did not end with the fall of the shah and the triumphant return of Ayatullah Khumaini from exile in February 1979, but rather with the rise to ascendency of the clerical wing of the revolution by the end of 1981.17 The more than two years between these events was the decisive period in the shaping of the new state and its institutions. They witnessed the severe fracturing of the

215 broad coalition that brought down the shah, as first liberals and then the left (both secular and Islamic) were forced into confrontations that the militant ulama and their new party, the IRP, handled very astutely. By the end of this period the leaders of the new regime were well on their way to consolidating their particular vision of an Islamic state in Iran, despite intense internal challenges and external pressures. The IRP won this struggle for power due to a variety of advantages: its opponents were crucially divided among themselves; it was better organized and better equipped for violent confrontations; it gained control over significant economic resources; it appropriated some of the enormous prestige of Khumaini as well as the popular appeal of his version of a militant Islam; and it skillfully manipulated a series of fortuitous external crises. The first revolutionary government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan was composed of Muslim and secular middle-class professionals and intellectuals. It set about trying to restore a semblance of order to the economy and polity in the midst of a highly mobilized population. A critical juncture arose in the summer of 1979 when acrimonious debates over a new draft constitution prompted Khumaini to summon the ulama to create an Islamic basis for the new state. This was ultimately enshrined in the constitutional provision for the so-called "rule of the jurist" (vilayat-i faqih), giving Khumaini far-ranging veto powers over the parliament (the majlis) and making legislation subject to conformity with Islamic law. In this period the repression of secular progressives such as the left-of-center National Democratic Front began under the auspices of the new security forces, the Revolutionary Guards (the pasdaran), which were also unleashed by the ularna against nationalist separatists and left-wing guerrilla insurgents in Kurdistan. The onslaught against secular and middle-class women began as early as International Women's Day on 8 March 1979, when a huge rally was attacked by Muslim street toughs known as hizbullahis ("partisans of God"). The seizure of the American embassy on 4 November 1979, by radical Muslim students led to the resignation of Bazargan, partly out of frustration at the turn of events and partly due to his association with American officials, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, just prior to the crisis. The fall of Bazargan did not immediately bring the fundamentalist IRP to the fore, but rather the left-of-center Muslim economist and politician Abul Hasan Bani Sadr, a close asociate of Khumaini in Paris in 1978. In January 1980, Bani Sadr won the first presidential elections over the IRP, which was still rather disorganized. The IRP quickly

216 regrouped, however, and dominated the March 1980 elections for the majlis, gaining over half the seats; only a small minority of sympathizers and independents supported Bani Sadr, who lacked a political party of his own. The next eighteen months saw a complex and protracted struggle between Bani Sadr's supporters and the IRP, against the backdrop of yet another external crisis, the war that began with the Iraqi invasion of September 1980. Bani Sadr drew support from the merchants of the bazaar, the secular middle class, and elements in the regular army, of which he was commander-in-chief. The IRP, by contrast, mobilized supporters from the urban lower class, religious students, the state bureaucracy and mass media (both of which it increasingly controlled), and its parallel military force, the Revolutionary Guards. The left was perilously divided: the old-line Tudeh (Communist) Party supported Khumaini and the IRP for their anti-imperialism; the new-left Fada'ian split, but both factions opposed Bani Sadr as an unreliable "liberal"; and the powerful Islamic guerrilla movement of the Mujahidin gradually drew closer to Bani Sadr since it viewed the clerical IRP as bearers of a reactionary vision of Islam. In June 1981 the IRP-dominated maflis stripped Bani Sadr of the presidency and forced him into hiding and, eventually, exile in France. This led to a fierce armed confrontation between the Mujahidin and the IRE Over the summer of 1981 Mujahidin bombs killed the IRP prime minister, the interim president, the head of the party, and numerous majlis members, while the Revolutionary Guards, for their part, killed hundreds of Mujahidin supporters; hundreds more were arrested and executed. Most of the established left condemned the Mujahidin insurrection, which ended with the organization decimated, driven underground and into exile. By late 1982, the IRP was in clear control of the situation, and could proceed to jail its erstwhile left-wing supporters in the Tudeh and Fada'ian-Majority and to silence its conservative and liberal clerical critics as well (the latter included Ayatullah Muhammad Kazim Shari'at-madari, whose Muslim People's Republican Party, centered in Turkish-speaking Azarbaijan province, was isolated and crushed as early as December 1979). Throughout the 1980s, the IRP skillfully consolidated its hold on society by remaking the institutions of the Iranian state in an Islamic mold. The legal system was brought under religious jurisdiction, radio and television were harnessed to the propaganda needs of the party,

217 and the universities were closed for two years in order to remove secular teachers and "Islamicize" the curriculum. The Revolutionary Guards were strengthened as a military and intelligence-gathering force, and the regular army was supervised by IRP political-ideological commissars; the size of the armed forces grew from 390,000 in 1976 to more than 1.1 million by the mid-1980s, including the regular army, the Revolutionary Guards, and reservists (basij). TM The state bureaucracy was purged several times and staffed by loyal supporters. Furthermore, as will be seen below, large sectors of the economy also came under the state's control, giving it vast material resources with which to reward the faithful. By the late 1980s the public political sphere in Iran was restricted to factions within the IRP. These divided into so-called "radicals" and "pragmatists" on the key issues of the economy, the prosecution of the war with Iraq, and the export of the revolution, with complex, crosscutting alliances forming on combinations of these issues, all under the watchful eye of Khumaini himself. The eventual dissolution of the IRP in 1987 due to bickering among these factions, however, only underscored the overall hegemony of the ulama within the political system. The untroubled political succession after Khumaini's death in June 1989 gave further testimony to the solidity of the new state institutions, with Hujjat al-islam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani emerging as a powerful president, supported by Ayatullah ~kli Husayn Khamene'i, Khumaini's spiritual successor. Ayatullah Khumaini may have been an enormously charismatic leader, but the power of the new Iranian regime was clearly based on much more than his popular appeal alone. In summary, the revolutionary ulama emerged from the fragmentation of the populist alliance after 1979 as the ultimate arbiters of power in Iran due to the disunity of their secular and clerical opponents, their more effective mobilization of mass support, their control over vast state revenues, and their ability to turn external crises into opportunities to rally the nation under the banner of their version of Islam, which, while narrowly theocratic, also spoke to the dignity of the oppressed and exploited Iranian masses. The ulama's victory put an end to the uneasy coexistence of political forces with distinctive visions of post-revolutionary Iran, forces that clashed violently with one another through 1981. Crucially, the liberals, the left, and Islamic socialists failed to unite during this fateful period, while the IRP united closely together despite the differences among its members. Furthermore, unlike in Nicaragua, there was never a significant fight-wing or

218 bourgeois opposition to the shah that might have become a significant political force after the fall of the old regime; the small, elite social base of the shah's regime largely went into exile. As a result of all these factors, the opposition to the revolutionary ulama was basically eliminated from the scene, and a new theocratic state was able to consolidate a strong institutional grip on society.

Word-systemic pressures Though economic dependency did not evaporate overnight with the fall of the shah, Iran's post-war "special relationship" with the United States was dealt a severe blow, which proved fatal after the November 1979 seizure of the American embassy by radical students acting independently of the Bazargan government. The four hundred "Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line" initially planned to hold onto the hostages only for a few days, but the massive demonstrations of public support for their action and the discovery of considerable amounts of intelligence data inside the embassy convinced them to broaden their demands to include the return of the shah from the United States to stand trial, and the repatriation of S 24 billion of his wealth taken outside of the country. As noted above, the liberal Bazargan government fell immediately after the embassy's seizure, and, as the crisis wore on into 1980, the left-ofcenter administration of Bani Sadr was weakened by its inability to settle the confrontation (as was the Carter administration in the United States), whose prolongation Khumaini supported. Though the shah and his wealth were never returned (nor were the billions of dollars of Iranian assets that had been frozen by Carter), the crisis neutralized U.S. pressure on Iran in the post-revolutionary period and dramatically severed the web of political, military, financial, and economic ties of dependence established under the shah. The internal basis for any U.S. intervention in Iran was thereby broken, for along with the CIA presence the potential domestic support for a coup or destabilization program was effectively eliminated. The militant Islamic ideology of the ruling IRP also received a boost in the public's political consciousness at the expense of liberals, moderates, conservatives, and the left. 19 With the severance of these ties, moreover, the issue of U.S. domination of Iran began to recede somewhat, and the Iran-Contra arms scandal of 1986-1988 failed to damage the credibility of majlis speaker Rafsanjani, who was loosely associated with overtures to the United States.

219 Instead, the scandal had the paradoxical effect of undermining Rafsanjani's radical IRP rivals, including Ayatullah Husayn-~kli Muntazari, who was removed as Khumaini's heir in April 1989. 20 In short, while the U.S. remained a factor in Iranian politics and in the public imagination, it was thwarted as an effective political force by the IRP after the fall of the shah. 21 The regime also turned to its advantage a still greater external threat, the war with Iraq (1980-1988), though the cost to the transformative potential of the revolution was enormous. Iraqi dictator Saddam Husayn had several motives for his September 1980 invasion of Iran: he feared the export of Islamic revolution to Iraq's large Shi'a population; he sought political leadership in the Arab world; and he calculated that Iran's own Arab minority in the oil-rich Khuzistan province adjacent to Iraq would welcome him, while Iran's demoralized regular army would be ineffective. In this last supposition he proved grossly mistaken. The army and the Revolutionary Guards fought well, and the Iranian public rallied behind the war effort. By 1982 Iraq was on the defensive; now Khumaini, his domestic opponents cowed, decided in turn to prosecute the war into Iraq, demanding the overthrow of Saddam Husayn and sponsoring an Iraqi government-in-exile. Khumaini's plans, however, proved as futile as Iraq's ambitions. The conflict dragged on for eight years, producing some of the worst devastation since the World Wars, including human-wave attacks by Iran, the use of chemical weapons by Iraq, and the bombing of cities by both sides. When Khumaini accepted the "bitter poison" of a cease-fire in July 1988, neither side had won much territory. Instead, Iran had suffered at least 160,000 dead (other estimates claim 300,000 or more) and some S 450 billion in damage to cities, villages, ports, and oil facilities. The country had been set back a generation in terms of human and material development, a third of the government's budget having been devoted to the war effort. Balanced against the undoubted grief and war-weariness of the population, however, were the strengthening of the regime's coercive institutions and its undeniable ability to mobilize support for its war aims, at least up to a point. As Khumaini declared, "War enables us to fight the counterrevolutionaries," and the war, in fact, further discredited the diminishing Mujahidin threat after 1981 when the latter chose to accept support from Iraq. The war also kept public attention focused on Iran's external enemies and justified the revolution's slow progress in meeting demands on other f r o n t s . 22 Thus, in stark contrast to Nicaragua, Iran successfully neutralized the U.S.

220 opposition to the revolution and possessed the economic and ideological resources to prosecute a debilitating war that ultimately served to strengthen the grip of the new state on Iranian society. Islamic revolution was not exported (as at least some IRP ideologues desired), but it was preserved at home against external aggression and competing political forces. 23

The limits of revolutionary transformation Despite the considerable political achievements of the IRP in consolidating a stable regime, the Achilles' heel of the Iranian revolution has been its limited achievements in the economic sphere. Although Iran's 1979 constitution bears a striking resemblance on paper to the Sandinistas' mixed-economy model, the larger state sector that was created by the revolution has not been used in a transformative fashion. Nor have the stated economic goals of self-reliance and independence proven feasible given the distortions and imbalances of several generations of dependent development under the monarchy. Indeed, the reliable if limited accumulation capacity of the old dependent-development model was further disrupted by revolution, war, economic sanctions, and internal turmoil. The state came to control 27 banks, 15 insurance companies, 100 construction firms, 150 to 200 commercial companies, 91 agricultural enterprises, and some 700 to 900 industrial enterprises that employed approximately 370,000 industrial workers. There was also a substantial jump in the size of the state bureaucracy; the number of government employees, excluding the armed forces, increased from 1.3 million to nearly 1.8 million between 1976 and 1983. Meanwhile, the shah's industrial elite was replaced by a new elite of Islamic managers, often drawn from the educated sons of bazaar families. State industry generally operated at a loss, with mismanagement at times compounded by shortages of spare parts and other Western inputs. Much of Iran's foreign trade also passed through state hands at the expense of some merchant families (while others profited enormously through connections and because of the war). Small and medium industry remained the domain of a flourishing private capitalist s e c t o r . 24 Oil was the linchpin that provided the Iranian "rentier state" with the means to buy popular support, enact welfare measures, finance the war, and project itself as a regional power, z5 Output and income fluctuated greatly in the 1980s, with the war and falling world prices reducing ear-

221 nings in 1980, 1984, and from 1986 on. Nonetheless, oil revenue was a key to the IRP's ability to consolidate power and to dispense with the shah's economic elite - an advantage, as we will see, that the Sandinistas decidedly did not enjoy. On the other hand, the availability and seeming abundance of oil revenue also allowed and perhaps even encouraged inefficiencies in other economic sectors, and periodic shortfalls of such revenue eroded the state's social welfare and developmental capacities. Dependence on oil exports for foreign exchange, in fact, actually rose during the 1980s to 99 percent. Economic self-sufficiency and independence, clearly, remain distant goals. 26 In no domain was the conflict between radical IRP statists and highly placed conservative clerical upholders of private property more acute than in the countryside. Some rural land was spontaneously seized in 1979-1980, and the government eventually passed legislation limiting the size of landholdings. However, pressure from landlords, conservative ulama, and the bazaar forced a 1983 rollback of this law by the majlis and the Council of Guardians (a body of eminent ulama with the power to veto "un-Islamic" legislation). As a result, the net gains for the peasantry were modest. The government was able to penetrate the countryside to a degree through road-building and literacy and electrification campaigns. However, food production stagnated in per-capita terms as demand and population grew, forcing the creation of a rationing system that benefited the urban poor, but also requiring continued food imports of some S 4 billion per year. Massive migration to the cities continued apace in this context, overburdening the urban infrastructure as Tehran's population swelled dramatically from 4 million in 1979 to 11 million by 1991. 27 For all the nationalizations and cultural change ("Islamicization"), the Iranian revolution has transformed class relations only minimally. Although the old economic elite under the monarchy has either fled, made itself inconspicuous, or in some cases adapted to the new dispensation, a new group has seized the commanding heights of the state sector - in effect, a circulation of elites. The urban marginal population, which provided the "shock troops" of the revolution and the social base of the IRP, has benefited from food rationing, and some tens of thousands have experienced a sort of upward mobility, however dangerous, through the Revolutionary Guards. Nonetheless, the urban poor still number in the millions and continue to suffer appalling privations as a class.

222 The components of the middle class have had varying experiences dismissal from their jobs for some (including many women), along with adaptation and advancement for others of a more acceptable ideological stripe. The initial gains of the working class evaporated by 1981 as independent factory councils were taken over by the state and workers were massively mobilized into the war effort at the expense of their living standards. 28 High rates of inflation (a serious problem since wages are not indexed to inflation), significant unemployment (despite the huge size of the army and state sector), and a housing crisis have eroded the quality of life of the urban population as a whole. 29 In drawing up a provisional balance sheet on the outcome of the Iranian revolution through its first dozen years, both the political accomplishments and transformational limits of the revolution stand out. From the viewpoint of the clerical state, of course, the outcome has been a fairly clear-cut success: the theocracy has maintained its hold on power against external pressures from Iraq and the United States, and it has eliminated its organized opponents with no strong internal challenge on the horizon. On the other hand, these achievements only serve to highlight the revolution's failures in the realms of civil and political freedoms and economic development. The original revolutionary alliance has been irrevocably fractured, and the theocracy reposes on a far more limited social base than that which overthrew the shah a dozen years ago. Even the main pillars of the regime's support - in the bazaar, the seminaries, and shanty-towns - have witnessed marginal gains at best from the revolution in material terms. 3° The legitimacy of the clerical state remains limited due to its inability to implement a coherent redistributive model of economic development, and the "pragmatists" who dominate the new government are looking once again to foreign loans and investment as the solution to the economy's ills. "Their answer to the horrendous unemployment problem is trickledown economics worthy of the Chicago School," notes Ervand Abrahamian. 31 Whether the scattered strands of the populist alliance that overthrew the shah can take advantage of these long-term structural weaknesses, however, remains a dubious proposition.

The outcomes of revolution: Nicaragua As in Iran, the roots of the Nicaraguan revolution may be found in dependent development, the consolidation of a repressive personalist dictatorship, and the development of various oppositional currents

223 against these structural conditions. 32 The armed insurrection against the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1967-1979) that was led by the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) was supported, like the Iranian revolution, by a very broad multi-class movement that included students, artisans, tradespeople, blue- and white-collar workers, professionals, priests, and members of Christian-base communities. Unlike the revolutionary coalition in Iran, the anti-Somoza movement also drew support from peasants and agricultural workers (although the insurrection of 1978-79 was primarily urban-based), and it also came to include a substantial fraction of the national bourgeoisie. Unlike the shah, Somoza did not waver in his brutal use of force against his opponents, including aerial bombardment of urban neighborhoods; some 30-45,000 people were killed during the insurrection. The Carter administration attempted to outflank the Sandinistas by brokering negotiations between Somoza and his bourgeois opponents, but Somoza's obstinacy undermined this effort. Eventually, the Sandinistas themselves were able to reach out and strategically ally themselves with the bourgeois opposition, and the provisional five-person Governing Junta of National Reconstruction (JGRN), formed in June 1979, included Alfonso Robelo, one of the principal leaders of the bourgeois opposition, and Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the widow of long-time Somoza foe Pedro Joaqufn Chamorro, whose assassination in January 1978 led to massive protests. Accordingly, Somoza's eventual flight from the country, after his 7,000-10,000 member National Guard was gradually spread thin by multiple urban uprisings coordinated by the Sandinistas, resulted in the triumph of a broadly based movement and a provisional government with both Sandinista and elite representation. As in Iran, this set the stage for an increasingly intense conflict within the anti-Somoza coalition after the Sandinistas triumphantly entered Managua on 19 July 1979. As in the Iranian case, an explanation of the outcomes of the Nicaraguan revolution must focus on the consolidation and use of state power in a context characterized by the fragmentation of the original revolutionary coalition, external aggression, and continued economic dependence. For Nicaragua, however, we must not only explain the manner in which a particular political leadership - the Sandinista Front - consolidated and deployed state power after the fall of the old regime, but also why this same leadership subsequently lost power (at least partially), in the elections of February 1990, to a coalition dominated by its erstwhile bourgeois allies of the 1978-79 insurrection. The Sandi-

224 nistas' electoral defeat, in turn, calls for an explanation of both their unwillingness, unlike the ulama in Iran, to eliminate effectively their domestic opposition as well as their creation of a democratic constitutional framework in which they could lose power to this opposition. We must explain, in other words, the comparatively pluralist and democratic outcome of the Nicaraguan revolution.

Internal political struggles Unlike Iran, there was not a violent scramble to consolidate state power in Nicaragua immediately after the fall of the old regime. This was primarily a result of two factors: the FSLN's dominant position within the anti-Somoza opposition, particularly after the collapse of the U.S.-mediated negotiations between Somoza and his bourgeois opponents, and the fact that the other organized leaderships within the opposition were splintered and unarmed. As a result, the Sandinistas were able to establish "control over the composition of the new government and dominate the policy-making process while avoiding the use of openly authoritarian tactics." 33 In addition to Daniel Ortega, two of the presumptively independent members of the Governing Junta of National Reconstruction (JGRN), Sergio Ram/fez and Mois6s Hassan, were actually members of the Sandinista Front. The Front, consequently, was able to overrule the two representatives of the bourgeois opposition on the junta. Within a few months of the overthrow of Somoza, the Sandinistas nationalized exports and banking and expropriated more than 180 industrial and commercial enterprises and about one-fifth of all arable land in the country. By early 1980, furthermore, the Sandinistas had replaced most of the conservatives appointed to the original cabinet and controlled the most important portfolios. The Sandinistas also initiated a number of popular social programs designed to improve the population's health and welfare, including a literacy crusade, the construction of new schools and health clinics, and the subsidization of retail food sales. A major agrarian reform, initially oriented toward the formation of state farms and cooperatives, was implemented. And, in order to consolidate further their political base among the lower classes, the Sandinistas formalized and vastly expanded a number of mass organizations - most with roots in the insurrectionary period - including neighborhood organizations and organizations of youth, women, and urban and rural w o r k e r s . 34

225 With the complete collapse of the National Guard, the new Popular Sandinista Army (EPS) was built up around a core of FSLN guerrilla veterans and Sandinista-led popular militias recruited during the insurrection. The general staff of the EPS consisted exclusively of veteran Sandinistas, and "Political and Cultural Sections" headed by Sandinista militants were established in all units of the EPS and the Sandinista police for purposes of "political education." Even with these dramatic changes, however, the Sandinistas made it clear that they would not expropriate the non-Somocista or "patriotic" bourgeoisie so long as they continued to use their property productively. There would be no quick transition to socialism ~ la Cuba. And while the Sandinistas consolidated their control over the state apparatus, oppositional political parties and media were generally tolerated. The Sandinista strategy was to consolidate a new regime in which the bourgeoisie would be encouraged to play an important role in the economy, but would be essentially excluded from political power? 5 The maintenance of a mixed economy in Nicaragua, even after much of the bourgeoisie began actively to oppose the new regime, requires some explanation. Unlike most of Iran's Islamic revolutionaries, after all, the Sandinistas clearly saw some sort of socialism as their long-term goal and felt no fundamental ideological commitment to the preservation of private property. In our view, the Sandinistas' insurrectionary strategy of building a broad front of all anti-Somoza forces, including the "patriotic" bourgeoisie, while clearly important, cannot by itself account for their maintenance of private property in the post-insurrectionary period. Two other factors are probably as significant. First, the FSLN lacked sufficient technical and administrative cadres to run all of the country's large- and medium-scale enterprises. This would have been a particularly daunting task in Nicaragua under any circumstances given the relatively large number of medium-sized farms (10200 manzanas, i.e., 17.5-340 acres), which accounted for nearly half of all landholdings prior to the revolution (see Table 1). Even more important was the international context. The Sandinistas recognized that the bourgeoisie was the key to friendly economic and diplomatic relations with the West, particularly the United States, which would be necessary to reconstruct the economy from the devastation of the insurrectionary period. Of course, if a foreign power had offered the Sandinistas an alternative source of the requisite technical personnel and financial aid necessary for nationalizing the economy, the Sandinistas might very well have expropriated the bourgeoisie after seizing

226 power, like the initially much less radical guerrillas who seized power in Cuba twenty years earlier. However, neither the Soviet Union nor any other regime was willing or able to play this role. Consequently, the mixed-economy model that evolved under the Front is closer to that of post-revolutionary Mexico (at least since the 1930s), Bolivia, and Chile under Allende than it is to Cuba or Vietnam. Tab~ 1. Changes in land tenure in Nicaragua by property sector (in thousands of manzanas a) 1978

1987

Property sector

Area

%

Area

%

Private More than 500 Mz. 200-500 Mz. 50-200 Mz. 10-50 Mz. less than 10 Mz. Cooperative State ~ Abandoned

8,073.0 2,920.0 1,311.0 2,431.0 1,241.0 170.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

100 37 16 30 15 2 0 0 0

4,874.5 769.0 968.8 2,426.6 581.3 128.8 1,730.0 1,706.8 391.7

60 9 12 30 7 2 22 13 5

Total

8,073.0

100

8,073.0

100

a One manzana = 1.75 acres. b Area Propiedad del Pueblo (APP). Source: Laura J. Enriquez, Harvesting Change: Labor and Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua, 1979-1990 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 93 (Table 4.2).

Despite the Sandinistas' support for a mixed economy and political pluralism, by the end of 1980 a series of sharp disputes between the Front and the bourgeoisie over the sanctity of private property and representation within the new Council of State had effectively sundered the original revolutionary coalition. The bourgeoisie opposed the FSLN for its redistributive policies and its organization of both agricultural and industrial workers, and it was anxious and uncertain about the Front's position on nationalizing large properties. This anxiety was exacerbated in March 1980 with the promulgation of a decree penalizing deeapitalization or disinvestment as well as economic sabotage.

227 The following month Alfonso Robelo quit the Governing Junta - Violeta Chamorro had already resigned, ostensibly for health reasons after the Front expanded the representation of the mass organizations in the Council of State, a legislative body based on "sectoral" or "corporatist" representation of various anti-Somoza groupings, to give the Sandinista bloc a one-vote majority. Soon thereafter, the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP), the bourgeoisie's principal oppositional vehicle, withdrew its representatives from the Council of State. In November 1980, COSEP vice-chairman Jorge Salazar was killed in a shoot-out with the state police; the Sandinistas soon produced evidence that Salazar was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the government, although, for the bourgeoisie, Salazar's death "appeared to be nothing less than a gratuitous act of state violence to complement mob r u l e . ''36 The bourgeoisie thenceforth increasingly distanced itself from the government, attacking the Sandinistas with ever harsher rhetoric. A number of leading personalities from the bourgeois opposition would lend their services to the U.S.-backed armed counterrevolution, and most who remained behind would more or less openly sympathize with it. The Catholic Church hierarchy also broke with the Sandinistas during this period. During the controversy concerning the Council of State, the Catholic bishops suddenly demanded the resignation of those priests who held cabinet positions. The bishops (as well as Pope John Paul II) reiterated the private sector's fears about the Sandinistas' "totalitarianism," although it has been argued that the Church hierarchy considered the revolution's principal danger to be the decision-making autonomy of Christian-base communities and the concomitant transfer of the clergy's traditional teaching and pastoral authority to lay leaders. The hierarchy, in fact, proceeded to remove a number of priests from parishes with active base communities that supported the revolution; the priests holding ministerial positions, who refused to step down, were eventually suspended from their priestly functions by the Vatican. 37 Unlike the Iranian revolution, then, the Nicaraguans would not enjoy the blessing, let alone the guidance, of the country's leading religious figures. And in Nicaragua, unlike Iran, an internal basis for U.S. intervention remained after the overthrow of Somoza in the form of the Church hierarchy and especially the bourgeoisie.

228

World-systemic pressures The fragmentation and polarization of the original revolutionary coalition, in fact, was reinforced by the policies of the United States, particularly after Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981. 38 In March 1981, Reagan authorized the CIA to assist anti-Sandinista groups in Nicaragua and, in December 1981, authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations against alleged supply lines in and from Nicaragua to guerrillas in El Salvador. After two bridges were destroyed in northern Nicaragua in March 1982 the Sandinistas declared a national state of emergency - limiting civil liberties, including press freedoms and the fight to strike - that would remain in force for most of the next eight years. The Reagan administration not only organized and financed (with and without Congressional approval) a counterrevolutionary army - the socalled c o n t r a s - commanded primarily by former National Guardsmen, but also formed a civilian leadership, allegedly in control of this army, from some of the leading figures among the bourgeois opposition. At the same time, Washington sought to isolate Nicaragua politically and economically at the international level, with considerable success. "Largely as a result of American pressure," for example, "the World Bank ceased granting credits to Nicaragua in November 1982, despite an internal report concluding that World Bank programs there had been 'extraordinarily successful.'" 39 Notwithstanding the efforts of the Reagan administration, however, some of the Sandinistas' own policies undoubtedly helped to push certain non-elite sectors of the population into the counterrevolutionary camp, although the c o n t r a s are known to have coerced or kidnapped many of their "recruits." Prior to 1985, the slow distribution of land to those peasants who were not attracted to Sandinista-sponsored cooperatives as well as the below-market prices at which the state purchased peasant produce created a social base from which the c o n t r a s could result. So too did the forced relocation of peasants in conflictive zones, including Miskito Indians in the Atlantic Coast region, a° The Sandinistas' conflict with the Church and the worsening economic crisis of the 1980s (see below) also benefitted the contras.

The Sandinistas eventually responded to the c o n t r a insurgency with an integrated military and political strategy. A military draft was begun

229 and the army was expanded from 13,000-18,000 in 1980 to over 40,000 by 1984; local militias numbered another 60,000 t o 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 . 41 Most importantly, perhaps, the agrarian reform was accelerated in a new direction: henceforth, plots of land and land titles were granted mainly to individuals, and less emphasis was placed on establishing state farms or even cooperatives. 42 This policy was clearly intended to preempt sympathy for the contras among the rural poor, whose land hunger had not been systematically addressed by the Sandinistas. "In 1984 and 1985," in fact, "the government was compelled to use force to dislodge peasants who were invading private farms," and "Sandinista rural organizations and local FSLN members, sensitive to peasant demands, were pressing a reluctant national leadership to intensify the agrarian reform. ''43 Eventually, however, the Front's counterinsurgency proved quite effective. The contras' momentum was broken, and their troop levels peaked at about 15,000 in 1985-86. 44 The contras were never able to hold even a small town for more than a few hours, and they certainly never managed to incite a generalized anti-Sandinista revolt. 45 A different strategy, however, would be necessary to undercut the opposition of the United States and the bourgeoisie, the "internal front" of the counterrevolution. The centerpiece of that strategy was the elections of 1984: The decision to hold elections, announced in December of 1983, two months after the United States invaded Grenada, clearly came in response to growing fears that Nicaragua would be next. If elections were going to establish enough international legitimacy to stymie the United States, the FSLN realized, Nicaragua's opposition parties would have to take p a r t . 46

Accordingly, after much debate, the FSLN decided to "replace the Council of State with a National Assembly constituted by political party representatives," a decision that "drastically undermined the role of the mass organizations in shaping the course of the revolution. ''47 In fact, the representative democracy inaugurated in Nicaragua in 1984 and written into the 1987 Constitution represents a compromise of sorts that was partly intended to placate the bourgeoisie and the United States. This is not to say that the FSLN was ever uniformly hostile to representative democracy. Still, the 1969 "Historic Program" of the FSLN envisioned a "participatory" regime "based on the workerpeasant alliance" and said nothing of elections or the rights of political parties. 48 At least some Sandinistas, moreover, spoke of the 1984 elections as a purely tactical concession. 49 The 1987 Constitution,

230 however, although it declares Nicaragua to be a participatory as well as representative democracy, grants no executive, legislative, or judicial powers to mass organizations or to any other grassroots, participatory institution. The principal opposition candidate in the 1984 election, Arturo Cruz, eventually withdrew, claiming that the conditions for a free contest did not exist. 5° Still, six diverse opposition parties ran against the Front, winning one-third of the vote and gaining 35 of 96 seats in the National Assembly. The elections, denounced by Reagan as a "Soviet-style sham," were judged generally free and fair by observer teams from the British House of Commons and Lords, the Irish Parliament, the Dutch government, the Socialist International, and the Latin American Studies Association. 51 Neither the 1984 elections nor the "strategic defeat" of the c o n t r a s , however, ended the opposition of the United States and the bourgeoisie to the Sandinista government. In January 1985 the U.S. vetoed a S 59.8 million loan to Nicaragua from the Inter-American Development Bank for a large-scale agricultural project, even though the bank considered the project "viable technically, institutionally, financially, economically, and legally. ''52 In May 1985, President Reagan imposed a trade embargo on Nicaragua, banning virtually all commercial contact between the two countries. Scattered c o n t r a attacks also continued, even after a cease-fire was signed in March 1988, as part of the so-called Arias (or Esquipulas II) peace plan. As late as November and December 1989, during the campaign for the February 1990 elections, a United Nations observer team reported more than three c o n t r a attacks per day.53 And while the U.S. Congress rejected military aid to the c o n t r a s in February 1988, in the wake of the I r a n - c o n t r a scandal, the c o n t r a s continued to receive socalled "humanitarian" aid fight through the 1990 elections. All told, externally supported aggression took an enormous toll on Nicaragua during the 1980s. Approximately thirty thousand Nicaraguans were killed and tens of thousands wounded as a result of the c o n tra war. Government estimates of the economic costs of the war range from S 1.5 billion to S 4 billion, the equivalent of almost three years of gross domestic product. By 1987, over sixty percent of government expenditures (nearly one-third of GDP) were required for defense? 4

231

The limits of revolutionary transformation The transformational limits of the Sandinista revolution are both reflected in and symbolized by the Front's decisive defeat in the February 1990 elections at the hands of the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of fourteen diverse mini-parties that openly identified with the armed counterrevolution. As Carlos Vilas has argued, The outcome of the elections was conditioned in its most fundamental aspects by a decade of counterrevolutionary war that left thousands dead, wounded and crippled, the economic and social infrastructure in ruins, hundreds of thousands of people displaced - drafted into military service, relocated to refugee camps, forced to flee to the cities to escape attack - and basic goods in desperately short supply. The people voted against that. 55

By the time of the elections, more than a third of the population was unemployed or underemployed. Inflation, which soared to more than 33,000 percent in 1988, cut sharply into the income of salaried workers. "By 1985 a street vendor selling three cases of soft drinks each day could earn much more than a cabinet minister. ''56 Not surprisingly, there was a massive flight of urban wage earners, as well as rural folk, to the informal sector of the economy - a process of "de-proletarianization" that reversed a long-standing historical trend. It has been suggested that: "Whatever the level of FSLN mismanagement and corruption, the combined effects of the war, the financial blockade, the embargo, and destabilization by the internal bourgeoisie guaranteed that no FSLN policy, regardless of how well conceived, could be successful.''57 Nonetheless, while the economic crisis in Nicaragua was undoubtedly caused in large measure by U.S. military and economic aggression, it was unintentionally aggravated by Sandinista economic policies that were aimed, ironically, at shoring up the Front's political base among the lower classes. The agrarian reform, for example, led to severe labor shortages in the agroexport sector because it "provided alternative sources of employment to the rural poor, thereby alleviating the extreme need that had driven them to work in the agroexport harvests in the past. ''58 This, in turn, worsened a severe foreign exchange shortage that resulted in, among other things, a shortage of spare parts, which was itself compounded by the U.S. trade embargo. Hyperinflation resulted in part from the combination of the regime's redistributive policies, which pushed up demand, and lagging supply due to the shrinkage of imports and production.

232 Declining labor productivity also stemmed from the dearth of skilled administrators, economists, and accountants in the country. Labor indiscipline and absenteeism also hurt productivity, problems that arose out of a widespread belief that workers no longer needed to work as hard as in the past and were entitled to a "historical v a c a t i o n . ''59 All of these factors meant that, as in Iran, most state enterprises which were intended to become the principal source of capital in the new economy - operated at a huge loss. The purely economic rationality of state enterprises was also compromised by the broader social and political obligations they were expected to assume, including the retention of otherwise redundant workers in order to combat unemployment and the provision of various social services not only to workers but also to the local community and even the armed forces. 6° In their attempt to improve the lot of the majority, in short, the Sandinistas implemented policies that unintentionally compounded the country's grave economic difficulties. The economic crisis was also aggravated by falling world-market prices for Nicaragua's principal exports (coffee, cotton, sugar, and cattle), which contributed to the growth of foreign debt, and by high interest rates on that debt. Finally, external aid to the Sandinistas, especially from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dropped substantially after 1985. One observer has concluded that "the reduction in socialist bloc assistance may be the most important dimension underlying the crises of 1987 and 1988. "61 In response to this economic morass, the Sandinistas implemented "shock" austerity measures in 1988 and 1989, including massive and repeated devaluations of the currency, the lifting of price controls, cuts in government spending, and increases in credit to the private sector. Critics complained that these "reforms" did not differ from those traditionally prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, and, in fact, it proved impossible "to maintain workers' standard of living while attempting to provide incentives for agro-export capitalists, given external restrictions. ''62 "Real wages fell from an index of 29.2 in February 1988 (1980 = 100) to 6.5 in June 1989 and to 1 by December... Tuberculosis and malaria spread widely, and during the first trimester of 1989 infant mortality due to diarrhea was double that of a year earlier "63

233 Not surprisingly, polling during the 1990 electoral campaign indicated that the economy (52%), the war (37%), or both (8%) were viewed as the decisive issues in the election. And while a majority of those polled (52%) blamed Nicaragua's economic problems on the contra war or the U.S. economic embargo - more than twice the 24 percent who cited government mismanagement - 61 percent felt that U N O would be able to "reconcile" Nicaragua with the United States, while only 50 percent felt that the FSLN could do so, and fully 36 percent were convinced that the FSLN could n o t do SO. 64 The anti-Sandinista vote, in other words, apparently "reflected a decision by a significant number of Nicaraguans to believe that the United States would n o t accept a Sandinista victory and [was] a rational choice, under those premises, to bring an end to the war, the embargo, and the destruction of the economy." 65 A provisional balance sheet of the outcome of the Nicaraguan revolution, like that of Iran, would have to emphasize both its political accomplishments and transformational limits. Although the Sandinistas have been (partially) driven from state power, 66 the revolution has produced a number of changes that are unlikely to be reversed. First and foremost, a brutal, personalist dictatorship has been overthrown and replaced with a broadly legitimate pluralist democracy; in the process, a vicious and thoroughly corrupt praetorian guard has been replaced by a much more professional armed force that, however politicized, has proven willing to obey the cautious commands of the new government (including a reduction in troop levels by half). UNO's electoral victory, besides ending the U.S. war and embargo against Nicaragua, has not altered but rather legitimized the constitutional framework established under the Sandinistas, a framework that U N O lacks sufficient representation in the legislature to amend. Indeed, the 1990 elections helped to consolidate further a pluralist and representative, as opposed to participatory, democracy in Nicaragua. 67 Nicaraguan civil society, moreover, has been immensely strengthened over the past decade; a broad spectrum of political parties, media, trade unions, and other mass organizations is more vigorous than at any previous time in Nicaraguan history. The consolidation of a pluralist democracy, indeed, opens up a potential path to democratic socialism that did not exist before 1979, as does the raising of class-consciousness that at least some sectors of the population have experienced. These achievements notwithstanding, the social changes produced by the revolution are both limited and newly vulnerable, in part because of

234 the Sandinistas' own "self-limiting" agenda and in part because of the consequences of the counter-revolutionary war, including the results of the 1990 elections. To be sure, a major agrarian reform has been instituted, resulting in a more equitable distribution of land (see Table 1). Ironically, however, the principal legacy of this agrarian reform, especially its latter stages, may prove to be the entrenchment of rural capitalism. Indeed, the revolution, far from destroying capitalism in Nicaragua, seems to have merely scaled down the size of the typical enterprise, although many large private estates and factories remain intact. The state sector of the economy, which never accounted for more than half of the gross domestic product, will undoubtedly be substantially eroded under the new government, which like the post-Khumaini leadership in Iran, is dominated by unabashedly pro-capitalist economic "pragmatists." As in Iran, finally, the Nicaraguan economy remains as dependent as ever on the workings of the capitalist world economy, and that dependence will only deepen under the new government. Thus, regardless of the intentions and accomplishments of the Sandinista Front, Nicaragua is, in "objective" economic terms, actually further from socialism today than it was in 1979. 68 Not only has a bourgeois government come to power, but the economic requisites for a transition to socialism are no closer to realization that when Somoza fell: in fact, productive forces have been reduced to levels characteristic of the 1960s and, perhaps more importantly, they were not substantially concentrated, centralized, or socialized during a decade of Sandinista rule; indeed, by all accounts there are fewer proletarians and more peasants and petty tradespeople than a decade ago. Despite its considerable political achievements, then, the Nicaraguan revolution also starkly highlights the limits of radical change in the United States's "backyard," at least during the current international conjuncture.

Summary and conclusions Despite their evident differences, a number of striking similarities between the outcomes of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions have been noted here, three of which merit special emphasis. First of all, both revolutions produced stronger, more bureaucratic, and more mass-mobilizing states; a finding that accords well with Skocpol's statecentric account of revolutionary outcomes. As Farhi has noted, "Revolutionary regimes in both countries, despite challenges, consolidated power effectively and oversaw the development of more bureau-

235 cratized states quite capable of maintaining the mobilization of relatively large sectors of the population "'69 In this respect, the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions have not differed from the "classic" revolutions in France, Russia, and China nor, indeed, from state- and nationbuilding revolutions elsewhere in the Third World. Secondly, and largely as a result of the preceding outcome, both regimes were able to fend off external military assaults. Such aggression, however, produced severe economic problems in both countries and thereby eroded the popularity of the ruling groups, bolstering the fortunes of more moderate leaders. In Nicaragua, especially, a country that is smaller, poorer, and much more vulnerable to economic and military aggression than Iran, the U.S.-backed counterrevolution helped to produce an extremely severe economic crisis that led to the defeat of the Sandinista Front in the February 1990 elections. Iran's rentier state, by contrast, which could finance its war efforts with oil revenues, proved rather less vulnerable to external aggression. A final similarity between these two revolutions - and one that we have particularly emphasized in this article - is their limited success in radically transforming the economic and class structures of Iran and Nicaragua. Indeed, to a large extent the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions may be viewed as defeated social revolutions: the broad revolutionary coalitions of 1979 have been scattered and rendered largely incapable of advancing the agendas of the great mass of the population. These revolutions, to be sure, produced far-reaching cultural change: in Iran the state has significantly "Islamicized" important dimensions of everyday life, including gender relations, the mass media, education, and the legal system, while in Nicaragua mass mobilization and education in trade unions, women's organizations, schools, and a host of other institutions laid the groundwork for contested and meaningful elections in 1984 and 1990. However, revolutionary leaders in neither country pushed beyond a state-centered mixed economy (more for ideological reasons in Iran, strategic reasons in Nicaragua), and both economies are now being privatized and deregulated. Neither revolution, furthermore, has been particularly successful in promoting industrialization or in limiting dependence on external commodity or financial markets. Medium-sized farmers and businessmen have, if anything, increased their economic and political weight in these societies. Finally, while the landed upper class has been weakened, it remains economically intact and currently has a measure of political influence in both countries an outcome that distinguishes Iran and Nicaragua from most other social revolutions in the Third World.

236 Notwithstanding these similarities, we would emphasize five critical differences between the outcomes of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions. First of all, the nature of the political leaderships that consolidated power after the overthrow of the old regimes was, of course, very different - and this factor, we argued earlier, is essential (although not sufficient) for understanding the overall results of these revolutions. The new leaderships in Iran and Nicaragua differed in both their social base and their political ideology. Although the new leaderships in both countries, for example, had strong ties to the urban lower classes, the ulama in Iran were also closely tied to certain merchants, whose commercial disputes they traditionally adjudicated, and, to a lesser extent, large landowners; they had no such ties to either the organized working class or the peasantry. The Sandinistas, for their part, lacked strong ties to either merchants or landlords, but had quite strong connections to peasants and agricultural workers, at least in some regions of Nicaragua. Even more importantly, perhaps, the substantive political ideologies of these leaderships obviously differed in fundamental ways, despite certain formal similarities between the "populist," religious, and nationalist themes in their discourses. Iran's ulama aspired first and foremost to an "Islamic Republic" guided by the Koran (as they interpreted it), while the Sandinistas envisaged a secular (but religiously tolerant), socialistoriented revolutionary government based on an alliance of workers and peasants that was led by their own vanguard organization. We have noted how these ideologies, as Goldstone and others have suggested, are crucial if not sufficient determinants of revolutionary outcomes in Iran and Nicaragua. Secondly, the way in which power was initially consolidated differed in these revolutions. The outcome of the Iranian revolution was not firmly "settled" until 1981, and only then after a violent struggle between the ulama and their leftist opponents. In the course of this struggle, furthermore, any effective opposition in Iran (not only the left, but also liberals and monarchists) was essentially eliminated. In Nicaragua, by contrast, the Sandinistas were quickly able to assert their political dominance over the anti-Somoza bourgeoisie in the immediate postinsurrectionary period, and they were willing and able to do so in a nonviolent fashion. Unlike much of the opposition in Iran, the Sandinistas' internal opponents were essentially unarmed, and they were tolerated for the most part so long as they did not oppose the regime through extra-legal means or economic sabotage.

237 However, while both the way in which power was initially consolidated and the nature of the political leaderships that were able to do so differed fundamentally in Iran and Nicaragua, we have noted that the advantages these leaderships possessed via-~-vis their opponents were essentially similar. In brief, these leaderships were more cohesive, better armed, and above all more adept at mass mobilization than their opponents, in part because of their historic ties to the lower classes, yet also because their ideology and rhetoric strongly resonated with populist, nationalist, and religious idioms that were deeply embedded in the popular cultures of Iran and Nicaragua. A third difference in the outcomes of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions is that although neither radically transformed economic or class structures, there can be no doubt that the Sandinistas, at least initially, attempted and to some extent achieved much more substantial socioeconomic change than their Iranian counterparts - a difference clearly linked to the ideology and social base of the new revolutionary leaders. In their attempt to improve the quality of life for the poor majority in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas launched ambitious literacy and public health campaigns and, perhaps most importantly, implemented a farreaching agrarian reform that was aimed at both reviving the agroexport sector (while diversifying external markets) and attaining selfsufficiency in food production. While the new regime in Iran did implement literacy and rural improvement campaigns, no equivalent socioeconomic initiatives were attempted. An early attempt at land reform was essentially blocked due to opposition from landowners and conservative ulama, and, in general, "no systematic effort to articulate, let alone implement, a comprehensive revolutionary program of economic and social reform has been made" in Iran. TM The great irony here is that the new political leaders in Iran, given their control of a resource-rich rentier state, always had a much freer hand than their counterparts in Nicaragua to institute sweeping social changes. That they failed to do so is due both to the relative weakness of any impetus "from below" on the part of their own social base - in part because of the prominence of merchants and landowners within that base - and to the conservative economic views of many, indeed probably most, ulama. A fourth difference between these revolutions is the fact that the political leadership that initially consolidated power has retained it in Iran but lost it, at least partially, in Nicaragua. The defeat of the Sandinistas

238 in the February 1990 elections, we have argued, was determined in the first instance by the severe economic crisis in Nicaragua, a crisis that a majority of Nicaraguans believed was the result of the direct and indirect forms of economic and military aggression waged by the United States. Given the policies of the United States, voters quite rationally concluded that this crisis could not be resolved as long as the Sandinistas remained in power. In a very important sense, however, the Sandinistas lost power because, unlike the ulama in Iran, they created a type of political regime in which they could lose power. This brings us to a final, and perhaps the most important, difference in the outcomes of these revolutions, namely, the nature of the new political regimes that were eventually consolidated. In Iran, the revolution has given rise to a remarkably illiberal theocracy that recognizes few civil or political rights (especially for women and religious and ethnic minorities) and that periodically stages mass executions of those who have opposed the regime. To be sure, this regime is undoubtedly more widely legitimate than the shah's, and apparently somewhat less repressive since the death of Khumaini in 1989. Moreover, a specific sort of "democratization" has accompanied revolutionary state-building in Iran - democratization "understood not as an extension of political liberalism or the realization of democratic socialism, but as an enhancement of popular involvement in national political life ;'71 However, political debate and electoral alternatives inhabit a very narrow range of the political spectrum. In Nicaragua, by contrast, the revolution has produced a pluralist, representative democracy that generally respects civil and political freedoms (including the freedom of religion) and that has abolished the death penalty; political organizations from the far right to the far left actively participate in the political life of the country. Indeed, in 1990 "the Nicaraguan government became the world's first to come to power through a revolutionary struggle and then transfer power to its opposition voluntarily after free elections "'72 Neither the pluralist, democratic outcome of the Nicaraguan revolution nor the Sandinistas' willingness to cede state power to their opponents without an all-out fight is predicted, it should be noted, by most current accounts of revolutionary outcomes. Skocpol, for example, argues that the exigencies of reconsolidating state power in the face of internal and external opposition preclude such possibilities; the struggle of revolutionaries to maintain state power in such a context, which is also the

239 focus of Farhi's account, renders liberal democrats and democratic socialists politically irrelevant. 73 The outcome of the Nicaraguan revolution, however, suggests that this view is overdrawn. In our view, internal opposition to the revolution, as well as the hostile international context, unintentionally helped to foster democracy in Nicaragua, given the ideology and popular commitments of the Sandinista leadership. More specifically, we have argued, representative (but not participatory) democracy grew out of the Sandinistas' strategic commitment to national unity and a mixed economy, given the nature of the country's economy and the existing international context. Political pluralism and contested elections, that is, were viewed as essential for obtaining the political and economic cooperation of the national bourgeoisie, undermining the legitimacy of the U.S.-backed counter-revolution, and obtaining aid and credit from foreign governments and multilateral agencies. This strategy was based on the understanding that a rapid transition to socialism - which many in the FSLN would undoubtedly have preferred - was simply out of the question given the Sandinistas' lack of technical cadres, an economy based substantially on small- and medium-sized farms and enterprises, and (not least) the unwillingness of the Soviet Union (or any other country) to underwrite such a transition given its likely costs. In this way, the Nicaraguan economy's historic underdevelopment and continuing dependence upon both international markets and the capital and skills of domestic elites severely constrained the Sandinistas' undoubted ideological preference for socialism. The instauration of representative democracy was also undoubtedly eased by the Sandinistas' confidence that they could not possibly lose contested elections to their divided and, as they saw it, compromised opponents. In Iran, by contrast, the ulama were more ruthless with their opponents not only because they possessed an ideological world-view "that gave them the self assurance to use unlimited coercive means to establish vanguard control in the name of the whole revolutionary people, ''74 but also because none of their opponents were viewed as indispensable for economic recovery or international legitimacy. Indeed, despite the chagrin of the United States at the loss of a former client, the Reagan administration was more comfortable with the anti-communist, antiSoviet, and pro-private property fundamentalist theocracy in Iran than with the left-leaning Sandinista regime, even and perhaps especially after the latter had been elected in the relatively free and fair elections of 1984. The potentially more popular challenge posed by the Iranian

240 left and other forces led to a correspondingly greater crackdown on the opposition than did the contra challenge in Nicaragua. In short, both the domestic and international costs of eliminating oppositional forces were perceived as much lower in Iran than in Nicaragua. We have argued that both the similarities and differences between the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions (which are summarized in Table 2) are largely explained by the outcomes of the struggles over the control and deployment of state power in contexts characterized by the fragmentation of the original revolutionary coalition, external aggression, and continuing dependency on the world economy or domestic elites. This sort of context severely limits the transformative possibilities of revolutions in poorer, dependent societies. Indeed, whatever their guiding ideology, Third World revolutions are unlikely to produce radical social and economic changes, as Eckstein has suggested, so long as they remain subject to the constraints of dependency within the capitalist world-economy and to political and military pressures from its core powers, particularly the United States. Moreover, when such pressures are compounded by the underdevelopment of Third World societies, dictating the need for incentives to economic elites as well as programs to benefit the lower classes, the transformational consequences of revolutions are likely to be contradictory as well as limited. The future of Third World social revolutions, especially in the post-Cold War period of resurgent U.S. claims to global hegemony, seems even more constrained for those societies that would attempt to follow in the footsteps of Iran and Nicaragua. In short, we may indeed be on the threshold of "a period characterized more by the limits on revolutionary possibilities than by prospects for revolutionary development. ''75 On the other hand, the resistance that the United States will undoubtedly face in enforcing its hegemony - combined with the lessons of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions, among others - may yet open the way for new forms of revolutionary change in the Third World and elsewhere.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Cincinnati, 2 3 27 August 1991, Section on the Political Economy of the WorldSystem, and at the Workshop on Power, Politics, and Protest, Department of Sociology, New York University. For their comments and que-

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ties on this earlier version, the authors would especially like to thank Ed Amenta, Bettina Edelstein, Laura Enr/quez, Jim Jasper, Ed Lehman, Val Moghadam, Jane Poulsen, and Yvonne Zylan as well as the Theory and Society Editors and referees.

Notes 1. Michael Walzer, "A Theory of Revolution," in Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 201. 2. Jack Goldstone, "Theories of Revolution: The Third Generation," World Politics 32 (April 1980): 425-453; Ekkart Zimmermann, "On the Outcomes of Revolutions: Some Preliminary Considerations," Sociological Theory 8/1 (Spring 1990): 33. 3. See John Foran, "Social Structure and Social Change in Iran from 1500 to 1979" (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1988), "Theories of Revolution and the Case of Iran" (paper presented at the 1989 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco), "A Theory of Third World Social Revolutions: Iran, Nicaragua and E1 Salvador Compared" (paper presented at the 1990 Annual Meetings of the International Sociological Association, Madrid), and Fragile Resistance: The Social Transformation of Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); and Jeff Goodwin, "States and Revolutions in the Third World: A Comparative Analysis" (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, 1988), "Colonialism and Revolution in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Analysis," 59-78 in Revolution in the World-System, ed. Terry Boswell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press), "Explaining Revolutions in the Contemporary Third World" (with Theda Skocpol), Politics and Society 17/4 (December 1989): 489-509, and "Owners, Rulers, and Rebels: Revolution in the Second and Third Worlds" (paper presented at the 12th Annual Albany Conference, Department of Sociology, State University of New York, Albany, NY, 1992). 4. Examples include the two revolutions examined in this article as well as those in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. 5. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. ch. 4. 6. Susan Eckstein, "The Impact of Revolution on Social Welfare in Latin America," Theory and Society 11 (1982): 43-94. See also Laura J. Enriquez, Harvesting Change: Labor and Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua, 1979-1990 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), esp. ch. 1 and 6. 7. This represents the closing of the world-systemic opening or "permissive world context" that we believe, following Goldfrank, is an important precondition for revolutionary outbreaks in the Third World. See Walter Goldfrank, "Theories of Revolution and Revolution Without Theory: The Case of Mexico," Theory and Society 7 (1979): 135-165. 8. William H. Sewell, "Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case," Journal of Modern History 57/1 (March 1985): 57-85; Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), esp. Part I; and Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and

243

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), esp. ch. 5. Without going as far as any of these authors, Skocpol has also come to recognize the potential importance of both political ideologies and "cultural idioms" for understanding revolutionary outcomes - in part, significantly, in order to make sense of the Iranian revolution. See Skocpol, "Rentier State and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian Revolution," Theory and Society 11 (1982): 265-283, and "Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell," Journal of Modern History 57/1 (March 1985): 86-95. The work of James C. Scott is also important for understanding how culture infuses popular struggles; see,, inter alia, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Farideh Farhi, States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), esp. ch. 5. Farhi, States and Urban-Based Revolutions, 1 l 2. Farhi's book, which includes the only systematic examination of revolutionary outcomes in Iran and Nicaragua that we have seen, was written prior to the death of Ayatollah Khumaini in 1989 as well as the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. For an account of this process and the debates surrounding it, see Foran, Fragile Resistance, ch. 8-9. On Iran's "nonrevolutionary peasantry," see Farhad Kazemi and Ervand Abrahamian, "The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry of Modern Iran," Iranian Studies 11 (1978): 259-304. See, e.g., Hamid Algar, The Islamic Revolution in Iran (London: The Muslim Institute, 1980); Kalim Siddiqui et al., The Islamic Revolution: Achievements, Obstacles and Goals (London: Open Press, 1980); and Imam Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of lmam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981). See, e.g., Ervand Abrahamian, "Khomeini: Fundamentalist or Populist?" New Left Review, No. 186 (March-April 1991): 102-119, and Val Moghadam, "Populist Revolution and the Islamic State in Iran," pp. 147-163 in Revolution in the WorldSystem, ed. Terry Boswell (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1989). For this last conceptualization, see Said Amir Arjomand, "The Causes and Significance of the Iranian Revolution," State, Culture and Society 1/3 (1985): 41-66. The following account is based largely on Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Dilip Hiro, lran Under the Ayatollahs (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Mohammad Amjad, Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1989); and Mansoor Moaddel, "Class Struggle in Post-Revolutionary Iran," International Journal of Middle East Studies 23/3 (1991): 317-343. Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, 215 (Table 8), and Dilip Hiro, "The Impact of the Gulf War in Iran" (lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 22 October 1986). Amjad, Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy, 140-141, and Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, 114. The fortunes of the pragmatists were bolstered vis-/a-vis the radicals in the late 1980s by the economic crisis, the poor performance of the state sector of the economy, and the perceived requirements for reconstruction following the war with Iraq, including the reestablishment of ties with Western governments.

244 21. The Reagan administration's foreign policy toward Iran in the early 1980s may also have been moderated by the Iranian government's knowledge of alleged secret negotiations involving the 1980 Reagan campaign team concerning the fate of the U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran. The negotiators purportedly struck a deal whereby Iran would hold the diplomats captive until after the election, thereby averting a last-minute agreement with the Carter administration (the much-feared "October surprise"). 22. See Amjad, Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy 143-144; Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, 126-129; Hiro, lran Under the Ayatollahs, 239; and John Simpson, "Along the Streets of Tehran," Harper's Magazine (January 1988): 39. 23. The U.S.-Iraqi confrontation in the Gulf in 1990-91 ironically served to conclude the Iran-Iraq war on terms favorable to Iran, which was in the enviable position of seeing its two greatest foreign opponents fight each other. Here the world-system was again kinder to Iran than to Nicaragua. 24. On the Iranian economy, see Setareh Karimi, "Economic Policies and Structural Changes Since the Revolution," in The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Eric Hooglund (Syraeuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 33-34, 42; M. H. Pesaran, "The System of Dependent Capitalism in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Iran," International Journal of Middle East Studies 14/4 (1982): 513-514, 5!8-519; Bakhash, TheReign oftheAyatollahs, 178-184; Amjad, Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy, 150-151; and Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown 164, 173, 216 (Table 10). A recent comprehensive study is Hooshang Amirahmadi, Revolution and Economic Transition: The Iranian Experience (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990). 25. On the concept of "rentier state," see Hossein Mahdavy, "The Patterns and Problems of Economic Development in Rentier States: The Case of Iran," in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, ed. M.A. Cook (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 428-467. 26. On the oil sector, see Eric Hooglund, "Iran 1980-85: Political and Economic Trends," in The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Eric Hooglund (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 26-28; Karimi, "Economic Policies and Structural Changes," 33, 40; OPEC, OPEC Member Country Profiles (Vienna: OPEC, 1983), 44-45; and Amjad, Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy, 151-152. 27. On developments in the countryside, see Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown; Amjad, Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy, 151; Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, 197-213; Hooglund, "Iran 1980-85," 27; Karimi, "Economic Policies and Structural Changes," 46-51; and Judith Miller, "Iran's Economic Changes Cause Pain," The New York Times, 9 April 1991. 28. See Assef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran: A Third Worm Experience of Workers" Control (London: Zed Press, 1987), and Val Moghadam, "Industrial Development, Culture and Working-Class Politics: A Case Study of Tabriz Industrial Workers in the Iranian Revolution," International Sociology 2/2 (1987): 151175. 29. On social mobility and class structure, see Ahmad Ashraf, "There is a feeling the regime owes something to the people," MERIP Report (January-February 1989): 17, and Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, 244-245. 30. In April and May 1992, protests by shanty-town dwellers against forced evictions led to clashes with the police and a number of deaths in several major cities. A number of those arrested were subsequently executed after summary trials. These

245

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

were the most serious public disturbances in a decade and bear an uncanny resemblance to events in the summer of 1977. See "Violence Spreads in Iran as the Poor Are Evicted," The New York Times, 1 June 1992; Katayon Ghazi, "Iran Executes 4 More in Anti-Government Rioting," The New York Times, 12 June 1992; and Robin Wright, "A Teheran Spring," The New Yorker 22 June 1992): 49-83. Abrahamian, "Khomeini," 119. See also Miller, "Iran's Economic Changes Cause Pain," which reports that Gross Domestic Product in 1991 remained below 1978 levels. The following account of the insurrection in Nicaragua is based on John A. Booth, The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution, 2nd edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), esp. ch. 8; Carlos M. Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Ricardo E. Chavarrfa, "The Revolutionary Insurrection," in Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, ed. Jack A. Goldstone (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 152-159; and D6vora Grynspan, "Nicaragua: A New Model for Popular Revolution in Latin America," in Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Jack A. Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 88-115. Stephen M. Gorman, "Power and Consolidation in the Nicaraguan Revolution," Journal of Latin American Studies 13/1 (1981): 138. See Gary Ruchwarger, People in Power."Forging a Grassroots Democracy in Nicaragua (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), ch. 2-4. See Dennis Gilbert, Sandinistas: The Party and the Revolution (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 117-118. James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1988), 275. See also Gilbert, Sandinistas, 113. Michael Dodson and Laura Nuzzi O'Shanghnessy, Nicaragua's Other Revolution: Religious Faith and Political Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 184-193,220. A complete explanation for the violent U.S. opposition to the Nicaraguan revolution - which we cannot attempt to provide here - would have to include, among other factors, cold-war considerations and perhaps especially the fear that the example of a successful pluralist, mixed-economy revolutionary model would harm U.S. interests if emulated elsewhere in the Third World. Stephen Kinzer, Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1991), 305. The Sandinistas' persecution of cultural minorities bears some similarity to the attacks on Bahais, Jews, and Arabs by the Iranian regime, although the Front's relations with the Atlantic coast population improved considerably by the late 1980s. Stephen M. Gorman and Thomas W. Walker, "The Armed Forces," in Nicaragua: The First Five Years, ed. Thomas W. Walker (New York: Praeger, 1985), 112-113. See, e.g., William I. Robinson and Kent Norsworthy, David and Goliath: The U.S. WarAgainst Nicaragua (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 271. Gilbert, SandinBtas, 94. LASA (Latin American Studies Association), "Electoral Democracy Under International Pressure: The Report of the Latin American Studies Association Commission to Observe the 1990 Nicaraguan Election" (Pittsburgh: LASA, University of Pittsburgh, March 15, 1990), 5. See Robinson and Norsworthy, David and Goliath, ch. 9. George R. Vickers, "A Spider's Web," NACLA Report on the Americas 24/1 (June 1990): 23. In late 1983, the U.S. leaked a fraudulent document, codenamed "Oper-

246

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

ation Pegasus," that described detailed plans for an imminent U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. The leak, which was expected to provoke the Sandinistas into further restricting civil liberties, seems to have contributed to the Front's decision to move elections ahead. See LASA, "Electoral Democracy Under International Pressure," 8n. Vickers, "A Spider's Web," 23. See Tomgs Borge et al., Sandinistas Speak (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982), 13-22. See, e.g., Bayardo Arce, "Commandante Bayardo Arce's Secret Speech before the Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN)" (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Publication 9422, Inter-American Series 118). This speech was originally published in La Vanguardia (Barcelona), 31 July 1984. A senior White House official later noted, however, that "The [Reagan] administration never contemplated letting Cruz stay in the race because then the Sandinistas could justifiably claim that the elections were legitimate." Quoted in LASA, "Electoral Democracy Under International Pressure," 8. LASA, "Electoral Democracy Under International Pressure," 9. Kinzer, Blood of Brothers, 305. Michael E. Conroy, "The Political Economy of the 1990 Nicaraguan Elections," International Journal of Political Economy 20/3 (Fall 1990): 18. Conroy, "The Political Economy of the 1990 Nicaraguan Elections," 16. Carlos M. Vilas, "What Went Wrong," NACLA Report on the Americas 24/1 (June 1990): 11. Richard Stahler-Sholk, "Stabilization, Destabilization, and the Popular Classes in Nicaragua, 1979-1988," Latin American Research Review 25/3 (1990): 74. CARIN (Central America Research Institute), "UNO Electoral Victory," Central America Bulletin 9/3 (Spring 1990): 10. Enrfquez, Harvesting Change, 119. See Forrest D. Colburn, Managing the Commanding Heights: Nicaragua's State Enterprises (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), ch. 6. Colburn, Managing the Commanding Heights, 113-121. Conroy, "The Political Economy of the 1990 Nicaraguan Elections," 13. Stahler-Sholk, "Stabilization, Destabilization," 71. Vilas, "What Went Wrong," 12. Conroy, "The Political Economy of the 1990 Nicaraguan Elections," 27. Ibid., 8 (emphasis in original). "Partially" because tile Front remains the principal opposition party in the legislature, with sufficient votes to prevent constitutional revisions, and because Sandinista militants retain the most important posts in the officer corps of the national army and police. See Philip J. Williams, "Elections and Democratization in Nicaragua: The 1990 Elections in Perspective," Journal of lnteramerican Studies and World Affairs 32/4 (Winter 1990): 13-34. This is not to deny the revolution's empowerment of large numbers of the lower urban and rural classes. The growing class consciousness and organization of these sectors may yet provide a basis for democratic-socialist transformation at a more favorable future conjuncture. Farhi, States and Urban-Based Revolutions, 106. Ibid., 108. Theda Skocpol, "Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization," World Politics 40/2 (January 1988): 148-149.

247 72. Jennifer L. McCoy, "Nicaragua in Transition," Current History 90/554 (March 1991): 117. 73. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, ch. 4. Farhi does recognize the relative "political tolerance" of the Sandinistas, but stops short of describing the new regime as democratic. See Farhi, States and Urban-Based Revolutions, 108-109, 121, 124. 74. Theda Skocpol, "Rentier State and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian revolution," 277. 75. Vickers, "A Spider's Web," 27.